Showing all posts by Ziff

In Children, Church Life, Suffering

Ideas I Accepted Uncritically

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

Janey’s recent post “Should We Make Life Easier or Harder? at W&T got me to thinking about a little story bordering on aphorism that I recall hearing a number of times as a kid and a teen in the 1980s. General Sunday School President Mark L. Pace recently told a version of it:

Photo by Muhammad Syafi Al – adam on Unsplash

President Pace particularly emphasized the importance of every member learning the gospel for themselves. He shared what he’s learned from watching baby chicks hatch during the years he’s spent raising chickens.

Hatching isn’t a simple process, he said. It sometimes takes 12 to 18 hours, with the baby chick resting between bouts of pecking the eggshell. And on a few occasions, out of concern for the bird’s life, he’s peeled away the eggshell for the baby chick.

“All I can tell you is that every time I have endeavored to do it for them, instead of them doing it for themselves, they die,” President Pace said. “They make it out, they may live for several hours. But there is something about the physical process of them coming out of the egg on their own that gives them the strength to stand up and walk and adjust to life outside the egg.”

Similarly, people must spiritually “hatch” for themselves, he said.

Even aside from his explicit analogy to spiritual development, I think the story gives a clear message that we need to worry more about being too soft than too hard. It’s better to err on the side of letting people suffer too much than on the side of coddling them too much. (Along similar lines, I remember a Seventy including the idea “Hard Is Good” in his Conference talk title a few years ago.)

What I find most striking about the story is that I hadn’t thought about it in decades probably before Janey’s post brought it back to mind, but it’s an idea that seemed so utterly logical when it was presented to me at the time that I just accepted it uncritically.

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In Christmas, Fun, Music

The Twelve Days of Temples

Author ZiffPosted on 3 Comments
Photo by Isabella Quirino on Unsplash

On the first day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . renovation in Salt Lake City.

On the second day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . two vaporware ones1
and renovation in Salt Lake City.

On the third day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . three in the Congo
two vaporware ones
etc.

On the fourth day of temples, my Nelson gave to me . . . four near Mexico City
three in the Congo
etc.

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In Fun, General Conference, Music

Think Celestial: A hymn

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

A bunch of years ago, I wrote a post where I converted a particularly memorable Conference talk into a hymn. I thought this would be a fun exercise to try again, this time with Russell M. Nelson’s “Think Celestial” from October 2023. Sing to the tune of “Choose the Right.”

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Celestial is the way you must be thinking.
Keep in mind the coming afterlife.
Think not you can be merry, eating, drinking.
Be celestial as man and wife.

Chorus
Celestial! Celestial!
Stop thoughts that may be troubling you!
Celestial! Celestial!
Recall you’re one of chosen few!

Fabulous is the plan that God has for us!
If we tithe, attend the temple oft.
Chastity is the rule, it’s ever been thus.
Be safe. Don’t risk your parts cut off!

Chorus

Celestial! It will answer every question!
Celestial! It solves all hurt and pain!
Celestial! It erases all depression!
Heed not those who dare to complain!

Chorus

In Statistics

How well does a mortality table predict Q15 member lifespan?

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

This is a question people quite reasonably often ask when I blog about which Q15 members are likely to become Church president, using a mortality table as my guide. In this post, I used the same SOA mortality table I’ve been using to forecast longevity, and applied it to Q15 members who have already died, to see how well it predicted when we already know the outcome.

Of course a big weakness of this analysis is that Q15 members aren’t a big group, so it’s hard to say with much certainty how well the table is doing. In order to expand the sample a little, I looked back to all Q15 members who were in their positions in 1950 or who have been called since then, and have since died. For each month of each Q15 member’s life, starting from the later of January 1950 and his calling date, I checked how many actual months of life he had left, as well as what the SOA table said about how much life he had left.

“What the SOA table said” isn’t one number, though, because the table just gives, at each age, the probability of dying in the next year. (It breaks these down by employees and retirees, by women and men, by white collar and blue collar, and by disabled and non-disabled. I always use the white collar non-disabled men, the employees series as long as it goes, and then the retiree series.) What I do is to use these one-year mortality probabilities to find an implied distribution of probabilities of how much more time a man of a particular age has remaining. Really, what I want is just some summary statistics from that distribution: the mean and several percentiles, namely the 5th, the 25th, the 50th (also called the median), the 75th, and the 95th. At the end of the post, if you’re interested, I give a little more detail on this process.

This graph below shows a comparison of what the mortality table predicted versus how long a few Q15 members actually lived. The horizontal axis shows age, and the vertical axis shows years of life remaining. In the lower left, Bruce R. McConkie at age 66 (the left edge of the graph) had fewer than 4 years of life left, as he would die at 69. Cutting through almost the middle of the graph, Gordon B. Hinckley at age 66 had over 30 years left.

 

What’s interesting, of course, is the comparison of these actual life spans to what the mortality table would have predicted. The dashed black line shows the median of the distribution of probability implied by the mortality table at each age. As you can see, it flattens out as age approaches 100, as it always predicts at least a little more life (at least until age 120, where it gives a mortality probability of 100%). I haven’t shown the mean because it’s very similar to the median, falling a bit below it for younger ages, and a bit above it for older ages.

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In Politics

How does Trump embody Latter-day Saint values?

Author ZiffPosted on 9 Comments

I read a comment recently at W&T about Church members in Arizona being split on whether Trump embodies Latter-day Saint values, with most believing he does, and a minority disagreeing. (I’m not linking to the comment because on a quick search, I couldn’t find it.) As you can guess if you’ve read ZD much, I’m very much with the minority.

But it did get me to thinking that clearly there’s some connection that can be drawn between Trumpism and Mormonism that so many Church members are picking up on. After some thought, here are some LDS principles I think Trump follows or exhibits that make him feel so right to so many American Mormons:

  • Patriarchy: Trump clearly has little use for women holding positions of authority. Similarly, the LDS Church gives women very little institutional authority, having all-male leadership both at the general and local level. While Trump and the Church obviously disagree about rules around sex, they agree that women are the attractive objects who are responsible for it. Perhaps Trump’s largest-looming legacy will be appointing judges to get Roe v. Wade overturned so states could restrict or ban abortion. Similarly, while GAs claim to believe in sometimes permissible abortion, the way they talk about the issue makes it pretty clear they expect these to be so rare as to be irrelevant.
  • White supremacy: Trump is a thoroughgoing, unapologetic racist. On the Church side, while it has made some steps in recent years with occasional nice statements about racism being wrong, the racial makeup of the leadership still shouts white supremacy. The unapologized-for and now carefully waved away century plus long priesthood/temple ban still shouts it. The racist justification for the Lamanites’ dark skins in the Book of Mormon still shouts it. It’s no surprise that lots of Church members are happy to embrace Trump’s racism.
  • Prosperity gospel: Trump is wealthy. He may have driven many businesses to bankruptcy, but he at least has the appearance of having a lot of money. He signed into law a tax cut strongly weighted toward him and his wealthy friends. The Church similarly has a problem with worshiping wealth. Men called to be GAs are typically businessmen and lawyers, and typically well-off. Along the same lines, at the local level, bishops and their counselors typically have white collar jobs. The Church spends a lot of money to make temples look fancy in ways that echo Trump’s love of plating things with gold. The Church’s requirement of tithing, which is a disproportionate burden for poorer people, makes it a more comfortable place for better-off people. While the prosperity gospel may not be taught in as many words, there is a lot of coded language that gets passed around like “self reliance” and Ezra Taft Benson’s famous line about people to take the slums out of themselves.
  • Nationalism: Trump is deeply concerned about the United States not being powerful or white enough. (This point is of course connected with white supremacy.) He doesn’t want the country involved in alliances like NATO, and he’s suspicious of trade agreements. He’d rather slap tariffs on imports to show other countries who’s boss. He hates immigrants, legal or not. In the Church, while there have been movements toward becoming more seriously international, the headquarters is still in the US, and the top leadership is still largely American. The influence of Ezra Taft Benson’s paranoid America-firstism may not be as strong as it once was, but it’s far from gone. We also still have things like God saying in our scriptures that he inspired the US Constitution and GAs (and former GAs) who are clearly America worshipers. One disconnect with Trumpism is that many American Mormons have served missions in other countries and tend to be more pro-immigrant than Trumpists in general.
  • Authoritarian control: Trump hates any checks on his power. He openly mused while president about becoming president-for-life, he called for the 2020 election to be postponed, and when it turned out not in his favor, he tried to have it overturned. He hates having reporters check him on his fabrications or publish anything critical of him. In the Church, while we have some nice aspirational statements like Joseph Smith’s “teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves,” we have far more a norm of leaders directing and members following. GAs are so unwilling to accept feedback from the rank-and-file that they periodically send a letter telling us we can raise issues no further than our stake presidents, and we should never contact them directly. Another very telling example is that we’ve turned the sustaining vote from an actual vote as it was at the beginning of the Church to a loyalty test, where anyone voting opposed on any calling is doing nothing but marking themselves as suspect.
  • Revering elders: Trump is an old man. For Latter-day Saints raised to revere the authority of GAs who are old men, he fits right in (not even to mention that he’s white and wealthy).

It’s quite a bit, actually, that Trumpist Latter-day Saints are picking up on. Interestingly, I think it’s more often unspoken than spoken issues. For example, the Church doesn’t come out and say “women are lesser,” it just treats them differently. Or GAs don’t (any longer) say that people of color are lesser than whites, they just try to pretend the priesthood/temple ban never happened.

But I still disagree with Trumpist Mormons. Even if he’s a good example of white Christian nationalism, he utterly fails at any scriptural or other Church righteousness test. Let me give you a few.

In the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, Jesus pronounces blessedness on the following:

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash
  • The poor in spirit.
  • They that mourn.
  • The meek.
  • They which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.
  • The merciful.
  • The pure in heart.
  • The peacemakers.
  • They which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

None of these match Trump in the slightest. I imagine his supporters might argue that the last one does, because he’s widely hated for his righteousness in getting Roe v. Wade overturned. I totally disagree, as I don’t believe allowing or enacting abortion bans is righteousness. But even setting that one aside for the sake of argument, can you imagine anyone who fits this list worse? The meek? The merciful? The peacemakers? Trump is full of bluster, anger, and cruelty.

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In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, October 2024

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

Fastest hymn: “On This Day of Joy and Gladness” (Sunday morning) and “Praise the Lord with Heart and Voice” (Sunday afternoon).
Slowest hymn: “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” (Sunday morning), at least at the beginning and end.
Best hymn: “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” (Sunday morning), “And the Glory of the Lord” (Sunday afternoon), and “Holding Hands Around the World” (Saturday afternoon).
Worst hymn: “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet” (Sunday afternoon). This was just a usual congregational hymn, but I really don’t like it because it sounds like something that would be sung from a Rameumptom.

Longest prayer: 108 seconds, J. Kimo Esplin, Saturday morning invocation.
Shortest prayer: 51 seconds, Ciro Schmeil, Saturday afternoon opening.

Best title: “God’s Favourite,” Karl B. Hirst.
Phoning-it-in title: “Following Christ,” Dallin H. Oaks.

Best laugh:

  • Gerrit W. Gong and two of his grandchildren came up with the following dad joke: “What do you call a dinosaur who crashes his car? Tyrannosaurus Wrecks.”
  • David L. Buckner: “My father often reminded me that simply sitting in a pew on Sunday doesn’t make you a good Christian any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car.”

Best image: I really like Yongsung Kim’s painting The Hand of God that Juan Pablo Villar showed in his talk. I appreciate how Jesus looks happy, rather than annoyed, to be reaching into the water to retrieve Peter (or us).

Most troublesome image: While talking about contention, Dallin H. Oaks showed a picture of two men arguing. When I first looked at the talk, it was included, but now it appears to be gone. (You can still see it on the video of the talk on YouTube if you’re curious.) I’m assuming this means someone decided it wasn’t correlated enough.

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In Statistics

Church President Probabilities, Updated for President Nelson’s Birthday!

Author ZiffPosted on 11 Comments

Russell M. Nelson turned 100 this week, so it seems like a good time to look at probabilities of who among the Q15 is likely to become Church president in the future. If you’ve read ZD for any length of time, you’ve probably seen me do this before. Here’s my most recent post (and here’s a follow-up post). I’m following the same method I’ve used in the past. Using this handy mortality table produced by the Society of Actuaries, I estimate the probability of each Q15 member having died for a number of times in the future. Then, using the logic of seniority and succession, I can calculate the probability of each member becoming president from the probabilities of (1) all members senior to him dying, while (2) he survives. One small change I made this time versus previous times is that I looked at monthly points in the future rather than yearly points. It’s nice to make more fine-grained graphs, but it doesn’t change the results materially. For more on the method, see the “Method” section in my 2023 post.

This first graph shows each Q15 member’s estimated survival probability out to 30 years (360 months) in the future. Calculating this has always been a step in the process, but I had never graphed it before and I thought it might be interesting to look at. What’s striking, I think, is where a man falls out of line with those near him in succession order. For example, Elder Bednar is between Elders Andersen and Renlund, but of course in seniority, he’s ahead of them, as well as Elders Rasband, Christofferson, and Cook, even though he is younger than they are.

 

This next graph shows probabilities of becoming Church president by year.

 

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In Fun

Possibilities for a Surveillance Church

Author ZiffPosted on 12 Comments

You’re familiar with surveillance states. We all live in one, to one degree or another. COVID and mass working from home also brought attention to surveillance corporations, which sometimes track their employees’ every keystroke to be sure they aren’t having unauthorized fun when they should be appropriately suffering for their paychecks. (Speaking of which, I probably shouldn’t be writing this post at work.) But what about a surveillance church?

I feel like the LDS Church is ideally positioned to become a surveillance church for several reasons. First, it’s exclusive. Unlike so many American Protestants, who believe members of many churches can be okay with God, we believe we alone have essential ordinances that members of any other church are missing out on. This is important because if, say, the ELCA decided to try intrusively surveilling its members, they’d all just go down the street and become Episcopalians or something. Second, it has a top-down hierarchical structure. By contrast, if say the Southern Baptist Convention said its member churches should intrusively surveil their members, they could just ignore it or leave the organization. Third, it isn’t too large. The Catholic Church is also exclusive and top-down, but it’s so gigantic that I think it would be harder to implement a surveillance program across the whole church than it would be for Mormons. Fourth, it isn’t too small. I imagine there are a lot of much smaller churches that would love to be super controlling and surveil their members constantly, but they just don’t have the resources. The LDS Church is, of course, ridiculously wealthy. Fifth, it has multiple tiers of membership (baptism level, temple recommend level), which provides more opportunities to prod members into compliance to maintain (or improve) their position.

Okay, let’s get to my suggestions. Only they aren’t suggestions so much as just thoughts or ideas of possibilities that could happen. You can probably guess that they’re at least partly tongue in cheek. But I’m a little bit serious too. I’m thinking along the lines of the quote attributed alternatively to Ray Bradbury or Frank Herbert that science fiction writers don’t write to predict a future, but to prevent it. I hope none of these ideas come to pass, but if a true zealot became Church president, or even a more garden-variety fundamentalist leaner, I could see some of them happening.

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In Church Life, Communities

Connection or Control?

Author ZiffPosted on 2 Comments
Photo by Vonecia Carswell on Unsplash

In her book, You’re Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, the linguist Deborah Tannen points out a common issue in mother/daughter dialogue that becomes more prominent as the daughters age to adulthood: Mothers raise topics of conversation in order to maintain connection with their daughters, but daughters interpret them as trying to maintain control over them. The possible topics are many: who are you dating, where are you living, what are you driving, where are you going to school, where are you working, and on and on. Either party could be right. Mothers might in fact be trying to maintain some control in their daughters’ lives when daughters are perfectly capable of making their own decisions. Or daughters may be defensively pushing back when all mothers are hoping to accomplish is to know how their daughters’ lives are going. Or, most likely, something in between is true, with mothers being a little more controlling than they need to be (even unconsciously) and daughters being a little more defensive than they need to be. It makes sense that this connection or control question could be a fraught one especially for mothers and daughters (or any parents and offspring), given that parents are necessarily completely controlling of their kids’ entire lives when they’re younger, and in most cases, the kids’ entire lives are taking steps away from the parents.

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In Fun

Naming the BYU Medical School

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

Photo by Olga Guryanova on Unsplash

The Church announced yesterday that BYU will be adding a medical school. I have some suggestions for what it could be named and different medical areas it could emphasize. Please feel free to add yours in the comments.

  • The Neil L. Andersen OB/GYN Training and Fertility Research Institute (and Medical School)
  • The John Taylor Center for Research on Preventing Injury Using Ordinary Household Objects
  • The Ronald A. Rasband Center for Discovering Doctrinal Drugs of Divine Design
  • The Dallin H. Oaks Medical School and Conversion Therapy Research Center
  • The Brigham Young School of Digestive Health
  • The David A. Bednar School for Hospice Care of People Having Faith Not to Be Healed
  • The Joseph Fielding Smith Clearinghouse of Answers to Medical Questions
  • The Dieter F. Uchdorf Healthy Sleep Research Center
  • The Jeffrey R. Holland Musket Wound Treatment (and Infliction) Center
  • The Gary E. Stevenson Medical School (brought to you by ICON Health & Fitness)
  • The Joseph F. Smith Believing Blood Research Center (and Blood Bank)
  • The Neal A. Maxwell School of Supernal Surgery
In Books, History

Ben Park’s American Zion and different trajectories the Church could have taken

Author ZiffPosted on 5 Comments

I recently read Benjamin E. Park’s new history of the Church (in the US mostly), American Zion. It was such a great read! Of course as a Mormon who’s attended church for decades and has even read a little academic Mormon history, I was familiar with a lot of the events in broad strokes, but Ben (I’m acquainted with him, so I’m going to call him that) brought in all kinds of interesting context and information about periods of time especially where my knowledge was really thin. And I was also especially interested to read how he thought about events in the last couple of decades, when I’ve been blogging about Mormon stuff and at least generally following the trends of what’s going on in and around the Church.

Here’s an example of broader context Ben brought in that I found interesting. When the Church went to the state of Ohio in 1836 to ask for a banking charter, it was a time of a lot of pressure on banks in general because Andrew Jackson had successfully defunded the national bank. People everywhere were scrambling to work out how to handle financing issues. The state granted zero banking charters during that legislative session. So it wasn’t just that they were out to get the Mormons. It was that it was a difficult time and they were caught up in a difficult situation that made hard times for a lot of people. I love reading this kind of context because I feel like so much of my knowledge of Church history and secular history more broadly (both of which are admittedly pretty thin) are in silos in my head, and it really opens up my understanding when a historian like Ben connects the appropriate dots to make the Mormon experience make more sense in the context of the US (or the world).

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In Books

Ten things I loved about Steve Taysom’s biography of Joseph F. Smith, Like a Fiery Meteor

Author ZiffPosted on 4 Comments

I recently read Stephen C. Taysom’s biography of Joseph F. Smith, Like a Fiery Meteor. I’m acquainted with the author, so I’m going to refer to him as Steve, because it would sound strange to my ear to call him Taysom. Also, I’m going to follow his convention of referring to Joseph F. Smith as JFS.

  • I appreciate that Steve takes his readers seriously enough to occasionally introduce a theoretical framework for understanding an event in JFS’s life. For example, when talking about the Mormon diaspora that followed the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum, he first briefly discusses diasporas in general and the idea of returning to a homeland, and then shows how Mormons were both thinking of returning to a particular place, and also to an imagined one, an idealized version of the United States. Or again, when talking about how JFS made sense of the Manifesto, both for himself and for Mormons in general, Steve first refers to a historian who’s thought about meaning-making in Judeo-Christian religions more generally, before getting into applying the historian’s ideas to the particular situation JFS was in.

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In General Conference

Who is the gleeful gatekeeping policeman?

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

I really enjoyed Patrick Kearon’s talk this last General Conference. His message was well summarized by his title: “God’s Intent Is to Bring You Home.” He told the story of a policeman he once watched from a hotel window whose job for the day was to turn people away from a closed street. Elder Kearon said that the policeman looked like he was very much enjoying turning people away: “he seemed to develop a spring in his step, as if he might start doing a little jig, as each car approached the barrier.” He contrasted this policeman with God, who he said is eager to bring us home.

I thought this was a lovely message. But it seems obvious. Why would he feel the need to say it? The linguist Paul Grice came up with four maxims that appear to govern our conversational interactions. The first of these, which I think is relevant for this talk, is to be informative. We generally say things that we expect the other person doesn’t know. We want to communicate something. A Monty Python sketch provides a handy illustration of how this maxim can be violated for comic effect. When the pilot tells the passengers “There is absolutely no cause for alarm,” he of course brings up the possibility that there is cause for alarm, because why would he be telling them that if he didn’t think they might be alarmed? That is, the passengers are expecting the pilot to follow the norm of being informative. All the same goes for assuring them that “the wings are not on fire.”

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In Statistics, Temple

Temples Announced and Temples Completed

Author ZiffPosted on 13 Comments

Back in 2020, I wrote a post where I looked at the large number of temples President Nelson was announcing, in contrast with the slow pace at which their construction was taking place. Of course since then, the pace of announcements has only increased. In that post, I mentioned that he had announced 24 across the previous year and a half. Now, he announced 35 new temples in each of the past two years, and slowed only a bit to 15 in Conference a few weeks ago. In this post, I’m going to update the analyses I did for the 2020 post, as well as adding a couple of new ones. Nearly all my data is just taken from the Church’s list of temples, which lists announcement, groundbreaking, and dedication dates.

This first graph shows counts of temples announced, temples having ground broken, and temples dedicated each year since 1950. Note that for 2024, I estimated announcements as two times the number we’ve already had (as we’ve had one of two Conferences), and ground breakings and dedications as three times the number we’ve already had (as we’re about a third of the way through the year).

The biggest feature is of course the turn-of-the-millennium rush to get to 100 temples, where a bunch were announced, had ground broken, and were dedicated in pretty short order. The recent increase in announcements hasn’t been followed as reliably by groundbreakings and dedications, although dedications are clearly up since the pandemic. But they aren’t nearly up to the level of announcements.

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In Fun, General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2024

Author ZiffPosted on 13 Comments

Best hymn: “Oh, What Songs of the Heart,” Saturday evening. It gets bonus points for mention of Heavenly Parents, but I really liked it musically too.
Worst hymn:  “Lord, I Would Follow Thee,” Sunday morning. This was just very bland.
Fastest hymn: “The Lord Is My Light,” Saturday evening.
Slowest hymn: “Did You Think to Pray?” Saturday morning.
Best and worst choir: I really liked the Utah Valley Institute choir that sang Saturday evening. I was much less a fan of the BYU-I choir that sang Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t a knock on their singing; I just felt like the arrangements they sang had weird pacing changes. (Sorry, as a music noob, I can’t explain it any better.)

Longest prayer: 167 seconds, S. Gifford Nielsen, Saturday morning invocation.
Shortest prayer: 51 seconds, Emily Belle Freeman, Saturday afternoon benediction. I appreciated that she didn’t force herself to use proper prayer pronouns.
Unsurprising prayer difference: Men gave eight prayers, with the shortest being 93 seconds (average of 114 seconds). Women gave two prayers, with the longer being 68 seconds.

Best slip of the tongue: While conducting the Sunday afternoon session, Quentin L. Cook welcomed us to the 109th annual General Conference. (It was actually the 194th.)

Best title: Patrick Kearon, “God’s Intent Is to Bring You Home”
Overdone title: Dale G. Renlund, “The Powerful, Virtuous Cycle of the Doctrine of Christ” I didn’t realize until I read the talk that he was quoting Russell M. Nelson, who has a love of hyperbole.

Longest talk: D. Todd Christofferson, 1961 words. (He also gave the longest talk among Q15 members last conference.)
Shortest talk: Susan H. Porter, 1252 words.

Best laugh:

  • Dale G. Renlund showed with his hands the sizes of the tiny waves that knocked him off his kayak.
  • Massimo De Feo told how his wife told him the reason he didn’t remember them having any major problems was that he had a short memory.

Strangest joke: Jeffrey R. Holland, who hadn’t given a talk in a couple of conferences because of health issues, joked that it was because he gave a bad talk last time. He said that he was at risk of being banned again, “positioned on a trapdoor with a very delicate latch.” While I appreciate his willingness to laugh at himself, I found this an odd choice of jokes precisely because we have seen that speakers don’t get removed from the rotation if they do bad things. You can try to stealth canonize your favorite proclamation and still come back. You can openly set up a money-making scheme and still come back. It seems like a weird thing to call attention to.

Bad pattern: There was wall-to-wall discussion of temples and covenants. Two speakers—J. Anette Dennis and Dallin H. Oaks—brought up temple garments, which I feel like are mentioned in conference rarely if ever. (Gerrit W. Gong even exhorted members to buy our own temple clothes.) I have to wonder if President Nelson has noticed that maybe all the new temples he’s announcing aren’t drawing as much new patronage as he had hoped, so now he’s trying to drum up some more traffic to make them look more successful. This discussion showed up in some strange lines:

  • Jack N. Gerard said that in performing the atonement, Jesus “fulfilled the covenant He had made with His Father.” I feel like I’ve never heard this called a covenant before. Is this new doctrine?
  • Andrea Muñoz Spannaus said that “obeying our covenants” is one key to drawing on the power of Christ. Obeying? I’ve heard keeping, but a covenant isn’t a commandment or a rule.
  • Ulisses Soares assured us that “having the spirit of the Lord’s house in us changes us, completely.” Wait, so the temple has its own spirit now? Is the Holy Ghost at risk of being displaced?

Beloved buzzwords:

  • Russell M. Nelson’s “think celestial” line from last conference was picked up and repeated by a number of speakers, sometimes in strange ways. For example, Neil L. Andersen, with a reference to D&C 87, said that “[The Lord] spoke of a righteous people resisting the deceptions of the adversary, disciplining their faith, thinking celestial, . . .” Really? He spoke of that?
  • There’s clearly been a push to call temples “houses of the Lord.” This often sounds clumsy. For example, here’s the opening to David A. Bednar’s talk: “During a recent open house and media day for a new house of the Lord, . . .” Of course, President Nelson has also pushed to use the full name of the Church, regardless of how or where it doesn’t fit, so he’s clearly not one to be deterred by verbal clumsiness.
  • Ronald A. Rasband appears to not be able to give a talk without saying “by divine design.”

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In Equality, Feminism, Statistics

Reading Comments on the Church’s Instagram Post

Author ZiffPosted on 14 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, the Church put up an Instagram post with a quote from J. Anette Dennis of the Relief Society General Presidency from her talk in the Relief Society broadcast. The quote begins, speaking of the Church:

There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women.

The quote continues for a couple of paragraphs that add some context, but it has been edited since it was first put up, and I believe it was originally just this quote. In any case, it drew thousands of comments on Instagram, many from commenters saying this is obviously false. Comments were deleted a couple of days into the discussion, which provoked further outrage and sadness from commenters, but fortunately they were eventually restored and the discussion continued. The Church social media team (and many commenters) said this was a broader platform issue, although a Meta spokesperson quoted in a New York Times story (gift article—no subscription required) denied this.

The blowup was also covered in the Salt Lake Tribune. From the more apologetic side, the Deseret News published a couple of opinion pieces from women who don’t feel unequal in the Church, and Public Square Magazine put up a response to the New York Times article. From the more critical side, the Salt Lake Tribune published an opinion piece from Rosemary Card, April Young Bennett at the Exponent traced the line of thinking to then-Elder Oaks trying to placate Ordain Women a decade ago, and Lisa Torcasso Downing at Outside the Book of Mormon Belt wrote an extensive response to an apologetic post on Facebook. Molly at Roots and Reckoning also curated and categorized a few hundred of the best quotes from the Instagram discussion at her blog.

I thought it would be interesting to read all the Instagram comments. I found a handy tool called IGCommentExporter, and it pulled 12,578 comments into a csv file for me. I read through them and tagged them with themes they brought up and noted some of my favorites, and that’s what I’ll tell you about in this post.

Before I get to that, though, let me tell you about some limitations in the data and my work:

  • Instagram currently says there are over 17,000 comments on the post, so when I scraped them on March 21st to start this project, I only got about 70% of them. This means that I didn’t include Sister Dennis’s follow-up comment, or any responses to it.
  • At least a few people appear to have deleted their comments. I say this because in what I read, there were a lot of responses tagging commenters who appeared to have few to no comments themselves.
  • The comment scraper couldn’t give me the structure of the comments, by which I mean which were replies to another commenter and which were top level. I was able to reconstruct this for about 6,000 comments by just manually loading them in my browser and using a link scraper, but for the rest, I just had to infer based on timing and who, if anyone commenters tagged.
  • You can probably guess my bias, but just to be clear, I agree with April Young Bennett. I think the whole idea of women having the priesthood in some way is clearly just a hand-wavy explanation that Dallin H. Oaks came up with in an attempt to shut Ordain Women up without actually making any changes in the Church. The only way Sister Dennis’s quote can be made sense of is to start with the idea that LDS priesthood is real and all others are fake, so of course any access to it at all—even mediated through men—is better than even the best access to the fake priesthoods of other churches. (By the same logic, you could make all kinds of other absurd arguments, like that LDS churches are the most beautiful churches in the world because they’re the only real churches, and everyone else is just “playing church” [thanks, Brad Wilcox].)
  • I’m sure my bias played into how I tagged themes in comments. As you’ll see, I used more granular theme tags for critical comments than apologetic ones.
  • I probably should have made the theme tagging more granular in general, but at some point, reading through all the comments was a long process, and I had to stop tinkering with it and go with what I had.
  • Even setting aside my biases, I probably wasn’t the most reliable tagger, meaning that if I had read through the comments more than once, I likely wouldn’t have assigned exactly the same set of tags both times. (Serious researchers do things like estimate reliability of people doing ratings by having multiple raters, but it would seem unfair to rope anyone else into reading all the comments with me.)
  • I couldn’t always figure out commenters’ meaning, especially when they commented with only an emoji. For example, it was hard to distinguish laughing at from laughing with. I was fortunate that I could ask my teenage daughter the meaning of a few slang terms.
  • I had hoped to do some analysis of likes of comments, but unfortunately my comment scraper didn’t gather them. I tried to sample some manually, but it was clear that Instagram was showing me commenters it thought I would like first, so my sample was inevitably going to be biased, so I had to give this up.

Is that enough caveats? Okay, here’s what I found. I read 12,578 comments. I assigned each comment at least one tag, a total of 16,921 tags, or about 1.3 per comment. This graph shows how often the tags were used.

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In Fun

New Direction in Latter-day Saint Temple Plan

Author ZiffPosted on 7 Comments

Flush with success after its recent purchase of the Kirtland Temple from its sibling church, Community of Christ, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced today that it will be attempting to purchase other historic religious sites. Spokesman Orson Pratt-Whitney-Young explained that although the Church has expanded its temple-building program under the leadership of President Russell M. Nelson, that the acquisition of the Kirtland Temple “opened his mind to a vision of expanding our temple program in another direction.” Specifically, Pratt-Whitney-Young explained that the Church will be making offers of purchase on historic religious sites all over the world that are not related to the Latter-day Saint tradition.

For example, the Church has communicated to the government of England an interest in purchasing Stonehenge, the famed prehistoric megalithic structure. Although the site dates back to around 3100 BC and the Latter-day Saint Church only to 1830 AD, Pratt-Whitney-Young explained that some members of the Church believe there is a connection through the Jaredites, a group of people who fled the Tower of Babel in one of the faith’s books of scripture, the Book of Mormon. (In a later question-and-answer session, Young added that a former Church member is planning to publish a book outlining the connection, to be titled The Stonehenge Hypothesis.) Although the Crown has shown no interest in selling, Pratt-Whitney-Young maintained that the Church remains hopeful. He supplied an artist’s rendition of what the site would look like after the Church had made some “minor modifications” to “ensure the security of the site.” All would be welcome to visit the site once the Church owned it, he explained, although only qualified members of the faith would be permitted in the “tastefully small” Latter-day Saint temple to be built inside the iconic ring of massive stones.

In addition to Stonehenge, Pratt-Whitney-Young listed the following sites that the Church will be attempting to purchase from their current owners:

  • Notre-Dame de Paris in Paris, France
  • Hagia Sofia Grand Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey
  • The statue Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  • Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, Russia

Pratt-Whitney-Young conceded on questioning that none of the other governments or religious organizations who currently own these sites has shown interest in selling. He pointed out, though, that the Latter-day Saint Church has “been led to amass great wealth by the hand of the Lord” (the Church has large real estate holdings, as well as a stock portfolio valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars) and that this wealth might be used to change the minds of reluctant government and religious officials. “Governments trust in the arm of flesh, and this leads them to the iniquity of endless borrowing,” he explained. “Perhaps one day when their debt grows too great, they will see the wisdom in accepting our offers.”

In Fun, General Conference

Conference Predictions

Author ZiffPosted on 13 Comments
Image credit: Openclipart

If we’re between Palm Sunday and Easter, that must mean it’s Holy Week. But more importantly for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, after Easter comes General Conference! I have some guesses about things we will and won’t hear about.

  • Church purchase of Kirtland Temple: 70%
  • Church top purchaser of land in Nebraska: << 1%
  • Church purchase of Pacific Gateway Industrial development in 2022: << 1%
  • Kirtland Temple, the first temple of the Restoration: 90%
  • Kirtland Safety Society, the first financial institution of the Restoration: < 1%

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